MORALIST

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does moralist mean? 

• MORALIST (noun)
  The noun MORALIST has 2 senses:

1. a philosopher who specializes in morals and moral problems

2. someone who demands exact conformity to rules and forms

  Familiarity information: MORALIST used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MORALIST (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A philosopher who specializes in morals and moral problems

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Hypernyms ("moralist" is a kind of...):

philosopher (a specialist in philosophy)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "moralist"):

egalitarian; equalitarian (a person who believes in the equality of all people)

elitist (someone who believes in rule by an elite group)

utilitarian (someone who believes that the value of a thing depends on its utility)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Someone who demands exact conformity to rules and forms

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

disciplinarian; martinet; moralist

Hypernyms ("moralist" is a kind of...):

authoritarian; dictator (a person who behaves in a tyrannical manner)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "moralist"):

stickler (someone who insists on something)

Derivation:

moralism (judgments about another person's morality)

 Context examples 

I wondered why moralists call this world a dreary wilderness: for me it blossomed like a rose.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

This writer went through all the usual topics of European moralists, showing how diminutive, contemptible, and helpless an animal was man in his own nature; how unable to defend himself from inclemencies of the air, or the fury of wild beasts: how much he was excelled by one creature in strength, by another in speed, by a third in foresight, by a fourth in industry.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

His looks shewing him not pained, but pleased with this allusion to his situation, she was emboldened to go on; and feeling in herself the right of seniority of mind, she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularize, mentioned such works of our best moralists, such collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the strongest examples of moral and religious endurances.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)